Much has been said about the rise of far-right political parties in Europe. The United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union and the strong performance by far-right nationalist Marine Le Pen in France’s presidential election have been the starkest wake-up calls, while Hungary and Poland were ahead of the curve in electing autocratic national-conservative governments. The narrative goes that this wave is only coming from the far right and owes its origin to bigotry against Muslims above all else. However, a closer inspection reveals that Europe’s new political movements actually owe their success to a pair of failures: the failure of the EU’s centrist neoliberal mainstream to provide economic security to the citizens of member states and the failure of the parties on the political “left” to provide a credible left-wing alternative to neoliberal austerity. In particular, it is evident that the parties of the radical right represent a backlash against pro-globalization rule that has been diverted by a recent taboo against socialist alternatives. In most countries, the far right has benefitted from the ideological vacuum, but in a few notable places, leftist parties true to their roots have actually reemerged in force and have the potential to reshape Europe for the better.
In the mid 2000s, the European Union was unquestionably in a period of optimism and expansion, with several Eastern European countries voting overwhelmingly to join the alliance. However, it was soon struck by a crippling economic recession and sovereign debt crisis. The weakest link – Greece – collapsed outright and needed multiple bailouts, while Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland found themselves experiencing mass unemployment and teetering on the brink of insolvency. As many American economists have noted, centralized control of the Euro currency and the EU’s budget rules made traditional Keynesian inflationary responses to recession impossible or illegal. Unemployment in the nations of Southern Europe surged to 15-25 percent, and youth unemployment often over 50 percent. An entire generation has watched its future slip away; in many cases young people can only find a future abroad, resulting in a brain drain which the EU’s founders surely could not have envisioned.
Distracted by the acute economic crisis, government institutions overlooked the massive structural changes brought on by the rapid growth of Internet technology – online retail, ridesharing, automation, outsourcing, and more. All of these phenomena grew with minimal regulation, birthing the “gig economy.” The system soon received another shock in the form of the Arab Spring; humanitarian crises in Libya and Syria led to a wave of migration to Europe, both over land and through the Mediterranean.
In the face of these massive crises, the EU and its member states were structurally and ideologically prevented from responding effectively. On the economic front, Eurozone governments literally had no legal options other than cutting public spending to keep their ballooning debts within EU limits. “Left-wing” governments in Italy, Greece, and France imposed austerity policies just the same as the “right-wing” governments in Germany, Spain, and the UK. Concerning migration, member states were bound by the EU’s fundamental principle of Free Movement of People; “right-wing” Angela Merkel and David Cameron maintained pro-migrant stances not unlike those of “left-wing” François Hollande and Matteo Renzi. Neither did Hollande and Renzi give migrants a humanitarian embrace; in fact they had no coherent stance at all and could not reach a consensus. On trade, all leaders united behind austerity and free trade, continuing to push the proposed TTIP agreement with the United States.
Presented with serious and visible flaws in the existing model of European society, the “mainstream” right and left refused to follow their alleged ideologies, leaving voters that rejected any of these orthodoxies with no mainstream option to vote for. The left was particularly afflicted by intellectual bankruptcy in the sense that it had no counterproposals to the right’s program of austerity and liberalization. Socialist ideologies, formerly the primary defenders of workers’ rights, public spending, and economic protectionism, had undergone a major decline since the collapse of the USSR and remained tainted in the eyes of the elite class. In the 1990s, leaders like Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, and Gerhard Schröder led their “left-wing” parties in a steady march to the neoliberal center, adopting policies ranging from welfare rollbacks and tax cuts to financial deregulation and free trade agreements. Concerns about stagnant wages, outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to countries that provide fewer protections to workers, and the decline of organized labor were diminished and sidelined, with capitalist globalization presented as inevitable. Their successors remained at the helm of Western “left-wing” parties and refused to provide any defense of traditional socialism or social democracy. In truth, a vote for the left or right had ceased to be a real choice of economic policy in most of the West. As a result, there existed an ideological vacuum on the economic left, which was exploited by far-right populist parties eager to tie economic nationalism and protectionism to other forms of nationalism, most notably racism and xenophobia, as the failures of international capitalism could be easily pinned on foreigners.
This homogenization of the mainstream political parties, whether from genuine belief or opportunism, was the reason for their lack of resiliency in the face of the crisis. Parties with names like “UK Independence Party” and “Alternative for Germany” drew significant support from voters angry that mainstream European parties had ceased to even pretend that the big questions of society’s structure and future were in voters’ hands.
The case of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) demonstrates the hapless fate awaiting “left” parties that fail to return to their principles. Polls showed a spike in support for SPD in January 2017 as voters searching for an alternative to status quo avatar Angela Merkel were excited by the emergence of the new SPD leader Martin Schultz. Having trailed Merkel’s CDU by 15 points two months before, they found themselves leading some polls. However, Schultz failed to distinguish his program from Merkel’s neoliberal centrism or offer any bold solutions. His malaise culminated in a television debate where the two candidates blandly disputed details and Schultz failed to challenge Merkel’s vision for Europe. SPD steadily declined in the polls and experienced its worst electoral result since World War II. Two parties to SPD’s left gained seats; even more interestingly, polling data shows a significant decline and subsequent increase in support for the neo-Nazi “Alternative for Germany” clearly corresponding to the major changes in SPD’s numbers. Voters were enthusiastic at the prospect of a real challenge from the left and fled when Schultz revealed himself to be an orthodox believer in Europe’s current direction. His party is now the junior partner in Merkel’s governing coalition.
In the United States, horror at the Trump administration and Brexit has led many to dote on the radical centrist government of Emmanuel Macron as the solution to this crisis of confidence. His movement represents a longtime dream of the kind of liberal who idolized President Bartlett of The West Wing: firm and decisive rule by a technocratic, post-partisan, hyper-cosmopolitan philosopher-king. His main philosophy is the embrace of neoliberalism in all its aspects and total dismissal of all the aforementioned concerns about its effect on society. Spain’s “Ciudadanos” party is attempting to replicate this post-nationalist neoliberal platform. This may appear bold and fresh, but it is actually scarcely different from the Blair-Schröder Third Way playbook of economic liberalization that led to this situation in the first place. Blair implemented this program for 11 years and his country voted to leave the EU less than a decade later. Only one year into his term, Macron has fairly low approval ratings – almost identical to Trump’s – and has faced criticism as “the president of the rich.”
The true breath of fresh air is the reemergence of the principled, rigorous left in several countries, most notably the United Kingdom. Rejecting the post-Soviet taboo, the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn has called for a radical social overhaul to alter the course of globalization: an end to austerity; a surge of funding for the National Health Service, public higher education, and affordable housing; nationalization of key industries; higher taxation of the super-rich financial industry; and the deconstruction of Britain’s nuclear program, military-industrial complex and involvement in imperialist military adventures. Corbyn has survived multiple attempted coups within his party and drawn a huge following among Britain’s unprecedentedly progressive, diverse, and cosmopolitan youth.
The true left has also come back to life in the suffering nations of Italy and Spain. Italy’s “Five Star Movement” condemns the entire rotting structure of modern Italy and calls for a transformation of society based on the principles of direct democracy, environmental protection, the public right to water, alter-globalization, and “degrowth.” The last two terms refer to alternative economic models that account for the negative impacts of capitalist globalization and its perpetual need for economic growth. The Five Star Movement became Italy’s largest party in March 2018, winning more than 32 percent of the vote. Spain’s “Podemos” is a left-wing populist party inspired by the aborted leftist dreams of the Spanish Civil War. Supporting direct democracy and democratic socialism while opposing globalization, Podemos has topped 20 percent of the vote in the last two general elections. Spain has been greatly victimized by the status quo, as its unemployment rate remains around 16.5 percent nine years after the recession. Youth unemployment is far higher and countless young people have been left with no choice but to leave home in the hope of opportunities elsewhere.
In France, one of the historical bastions of left-wing politics, the democratic socialist candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon finished with 19.58 percent of the presidential vote, just 1.73 percent shy of the second round. He performed especially well among young people and drew a majority of voters away from the discredited, divided Socialist Party. France’s electoral system shut his party out of power and left his supporters with a dismaying choice between a far-right nationalist and an ultra-capitalist; nevertheless, his near-success shows that French voters have the option to retreat to the left rather than the center, and very nearly did last year.
The failures of neoliberal EU and national policies to address the economic, social, and migration crises on the continent have forced the public to revolt. The failure of traditional “left” parties in Europe to offer a true left-wing alternative has pushed the public towards far-right options that have co-opted left-wing economic rhetoric and paired it with facile xenophobia to present themselves as the obvious alternative to the neoliberal EU status quo. Taken together, the success of Jeremy Corbyn and the Five Star Movement, the near miss by Mélenchon, and the dramatic failure of Martin Schultz, decisively demonstrate that to survive and thrive, the left needs to let go of its attachment to Third Way orthodoxy and present a real transformational alternative to international capitalism with rigorous backing from economic theory and the grassroots, giving citizens the option of a profoundly different social future based in solidarity and common strength rather than racism or xenophobia.